The west's arrogant assumption
of its superiority is as dangerous as any other form of fundamentalism

The bombs have hit Kabul. Smoke rises
above the city and there are reports that an Afghan power plant, one of
only two in the country, has been hit. Meanwhile the special forces are
on standby, and the necessary allies have been cajoled, bullied and bribed
into position.

That is not all that was carefully
prepared ahead of yesterday's launch of the attacks. Crucially for a modern
war, public opinion formers at home have been prepared and marshalled into
line with a striking degree of unanimity. The voices of dissent can barely
be heard over the chorus of approval and self-rightous enthusiasm.

It's the latter that is so jarring,
and it's a sign of how quickly the logic of war distorts and manipulates
our understanding. War propaganda requires moral clarity - what else can
justify the suffering and brutality? - so the conflict is now being cast
as a battle between good and evil. Both Bin Laden and the Taliban are being
demonised into absurd Bond-style villains, while halos are hung over our
heads by throwing the moral net wide: we are not just fighting to protect
ourselves out of narrow self-interest, but for a new moral order in which
the Afghans will be the first beneficiaries.

The extent to which this is all being
uncritically accepted is astonishing. Few gave a damn about the suffering
of women under the Taliban on September 10 - now we are supposedly fighting
a war for them. Even fewer knew (let alone cared) that Afghanistan was
suffering from famine. Now the west is promising to solve the humanitarian
crisis that it has hugely excerbated in the last three weeks with its threat
of military action. What is incredible is not just the belief that you
can end terrorism by taking on the Taliban, but that doing so can be elevated
into a grand moral purpose - rather than it incubating a host of evils
from Chechnya to Pakistan.

Is this gullibility? Naivety? Wishful
thinking? There may be elements of these, but what is also lurking here
is the outline of a form of western fundamentalism. It believes in historical
progress and regards the west as its most advanced manifestation. And it
insists that the only way for other countries to match its achievement
is to adopt its political, economic and cultural values. It is tolerant
towards other cultures only to the extent that they reflect its own values
- so it is frequently fiercely intolerant of religious belief and has no
qualms about expressing its contempt and prejudice. At its worst, western
fundamentalism echoes the characteristics it finds so repulsive in its
enemy, Bin Laden: first, a sense of unquestioned superiority; second, an
assertion of the universal applicability of its values; and third, a lack
of will to understand what is profoundly different from itself.

This is the shadow side of liberalism,
and it has periodically wreaked havoc around the globe for over 150 years.
It is detectable in the writings of great liberal thinkers such as John
Stuart Mill, and emerged in the complacent self-confidence of mid-Victorian
Britain. But its roots go back further to its inheritance of Christianity's
claim to be the one true faith. The US founding recipe of puritanism and
enlightenment bequeathed a profound sense of being morally good. This superiority,
once allied to economic and technological power, underpinned the worst
excesses of colonialism, as it now underpins the activities of multinational
corporations and the IMF's structural adjustment programmes.

But recognising this need not be
the prelude to an onslaught on liberalism - just the crucial imperative
of recognising that, like all systems of human thought, liberalism has
weaknesses as well as strengths. We need to remember this: in the heat
of battle and panicky fear of terrorism, liberal strengths such as tolerance,
humility and a capacity for self-criticism are often the first victims.

In all systems of human thought,
there are contradictions that advocates prefer to gloss over. One of the
most acute in liberalism is between its claim to tolerance and its hubristic
claim to universality, which Berlusconi's comments on the superiority of
western civilisation brought embarrassingly to the fore two weeks ago.
It was the sort of thing many privately think, but are too polite to say,
argues John Lloyd in this week's New Statesman. He owns up with refreshing
honesty that in the conflict between Islam and Christianity: "Their values,
or many of them, contradict ours. We think ours are better."

Once this kind of hubris is out in
the open, at least one can more easily argue with it. These aren't just
academic arguments for the home front before the cameras start rolling
on the exodus of refugees into Pakistan. September 11 and its aftermath
launched both an aggressive reassertion and a thoughtful re-examination
of our culture and its values. Both will have a lasting impact on our relations
with the non-western world, not just Muslim world. It is that aggressive
reassertion that smacks of fundamentalism, a point obliquely made by Harold
Evans recently: "What do we set against the medieval hatreds of the fundamentalists?
We have our fundamentals too: the values of western civilisation. When
they are menaced, we need a ringing affirmation of what they mean." The
only problem is that "ringing" can block out all other sound and produce
nothing but tinnitus.

There is a compelling alternative
for how we can coexist on an increasingly crowded planet. Political philosopher
Bhikhu Parekh starts from the premise that "the grandeur and depth of human
life is too great to be captured in one culture". That each culture nurtures
and develops some dimension of being human, but in that process it misses
out others, and that progress will always come from dialogue between cultures.
"We are all prisoners of our subjectivity," argues Parekh, and that is
true of us individually and collectively, so we need others to expose our
blindnesses and to increase our understanding of our humanity.

Parekh argues that liberalism is
right to assert that there are universal moral principles (such as the
rights of women, free speech and the right to life), but wrong to insist
there is only one interpretation of those principles and that that is its
own. Rights come into conflict and every cul ture negotiates different
trade-offs between them.

To understand those trade-offs is
sometimes complex and difficult. But no one culture has cracked the prefect
trade-off, as western liberalism in its more honest moments is the first
to admit. There is a huge amount we can learn from Islam in its social
solidarity, its appreciation of the collective good and the generosity
and strength of human relationships. Islamic societies are grappling with
exactly the same challenge as the west - how to balance freedom and responsibility
- and we need each other's help, not each other's brands of fundamentalism.
If we are asking Islam to stamp out their fundamentalism, we have no lesser
duty to do the same.